You could try going for a unit of 25 Skeles with a Battle Standard Warbanner and Banner of the Undead Legion as central block and next to it a unit of 20 Grave Gaurd with your general inside. Well this is just a starting idea.

I'm not sure how much you know about undead but the unit sizes have been capped at their starting size unless you invest in Vampiric powers that allow the vampire to raise the unit beyond.

I don't think pure skele summoning will be that competetive anymore as I've personally find that a round undead list is the most deadly. I'm not really a competetive wargamer so others may disagree. But you could still have a skele army which has stuff like 2 units of skeles, 1 unit of grave gaurds, corpse cart, Black Knights and zombies. That is certainly a starting point.

"Adapt to heaven and enjoy ease; oppose it and toil in vain. None can deduct from the reakoning, or force what is fated." - Three Kindoms, lesson of life.

i know im being really fussy but i realy dont like zombies. maybe i could throw in a unit of 10 skellies just to make the core up? i dont mind hiding them somewhere and not reall using much in the game. but as i will have one or two vamps with Lord of the Dead ill have some scope of bumping them up somewhat

the whole point is i dont like the disgusting side of vampires so i dont want any zombies, although i know theyre a great cheap core unit.

i supose i could think of something else to use in their stead........

Your preferred list type will work just fine and still be relatively competitive. Before I switched to Ghouls, I ran a very heavy Skeleton list.

Obviously, run Skeletons as your core choice and make sure that they're fairly large units. Give them the War Banner and the Banner of Endless Nightmare. If you want to save some points and you have a fair amount of casting dice and a Vamp or two with Lord of the Dead (you should!), you can make one of your Skeleton units pretty small, with the hope of increasing it in size. I wouldn't, however, do that with all of your Skeleton units.. there are two many gun line Armies that will wipe out a unit of 10-12 Skeletons in a single turn of shooting.

As for Vamps, I'd say take as many as you can. A few of them (and definitely the General) should have Lord of the Dead.. and if you want, you can give one of them a Tomb Blade to resummon Skeletons with every kill. The Tomb Blade generally isn't considered competitive, but it isn't that bad and it is fluffy.

I've had lots of success with any list that is based around raising regiments beyond their starting values.
I focus on magic more than anything else in my list, so I typically take to the field with about 15PD plus bounds. To compound the problem for the enemy, I usually only ever cast IoN, or Raise Dead, usually on just 1 die.

Taking smaller squads gives you the benefit of being able to spread more points across other parts of the army. Some argue that a minimal size regiment of core will die too easily in early turns before you can raise more of them. That's fine- if the enemy is wasting spells and ammo on tiny core regiments, they're ignoring my 2 regiments of Blood Knights and my Black Knight deathstar. Or whatever other nasty regiments you want to run.

Write up a list, and we'll all have a look at it and see what we can do.

Well as a substitute for zombies maybe you could do something else, like maybe sylvanian peasants who are under control of the vampire, there just normal townsfolk who are under the vampires spell, and he uses them as cannon fodder in his armies, which is whatzombies are for anyways.